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Saturday, 23 August 2014

Regular messages that I get from
parents who have decided to bring up their children multilingually
often have “Which languages should I use with my child?” in the
subject line. The body of the messages, as often, nevertheless ends
up answering this question: the parents say things like “my wife
speaks X and Y, I speak X and W, and my mother, who will babysit the
child most of the time, speaks only W”. That’s three languages,
and choosing at least two of them, in this case dad’s languages,
seems straightforward: use X, mum and dad’s shared language, I
write back, and W, for granny’s sake. And, I go on, if mum feels
that Y matters, too, by all means go ahead and use it, too.

Most of these messages, however, do not
stop here. Those parents who don’t write to me in English, or for
whom this isn’t one of “their” languages, as they put it,
hasten to clarify in the next sentences that they also speak English
(let’s call it Z, and use this symbol to refer to any of the “big”
languages currently looming above us), as if not being a Z user were
somehow unnatural, or mortifying. The real question then comes
towards the end of the message: “So which languages should I use
with my baby in order to give her a good head start in life?”

Mentions of Z invariably carry a Z-must
undertone, even (especially?) when parents explain that this is a
very non-native and very non-family language to them, while at the
same time asserting their belief that early home exposure to any Z,
rather than to no Z, will trigger the desired lifelong edge. There’s
no undertone when parents add that Z will have to replace one of the
family languages that might otherwise have been a good candidate for
home nurturing, because “I don’t want to burden my child with too
many languages”.

Which gets me wondering: why don’t
the subject lines ask about “Which languages should I not
use with my child?” instead, since the questions are about
discarding languages? If X, Y and W matter, not least
monolingually,
because they’re family languages, how do we decide which one of
them will mean a waste
of child time and cognitive potential, as some parents see it fit to
argue, because Z matters no matter what? Which arguments, I also
wonder, can ease parental consciences about the burdensome
language(s) that must cease to matter?

I confess my mixed feelings about all
this. The good news is that agonising over whether to bring up
children multilingually is
becoming old hat.
I also get fewer and fewer questions from, for example, multilingual
parents wishing to bring up their children monolingually in
the foreign, global
and mainstream language used where they’ll move to, and where,
their reasoning goes, no other language can possibly matter. But the
questions that bloom in their stead are no less disquieting. What
matters now is being multilingual-with-Z, in the sense that if I’m
multilingual in, say, Icelandic and Bhutanese, I certainly lack the
edge of fellow multilinguals in, say, Mandarin and Spanish – or in
one of the former languages with one of the latter.

What “edge” are we talking about,
and when do we reckon it will deploy its effects? These questions
about choice of home languages have two things in common. First, they
ask, here and now, about how we can make or break our children’s
adult welfare against the competition by talking to them in the right
or wrong languages. Which leaves open (closed, actually) the question
of what we should talk to our little ones until they’re big ones,
including for granny’s sake, since she will share the children’s
here and now for a while yet. Planning home language policies has
started to look a lot like investing in futures, in other words. Do
we know which languages will matter to our children where and how,
when they’re no longer children? Or are we attempting to create
their future ourselves, by opening certain doors for them and
shutting down others as soon as they’re born?

Second, these questions reflect
parents’ persuasion (or helplessness, or guilt) that their non-Z
languages may be expendable because they’re non-Z. Ever since it
became fashionable to talk about multilingualism as an investment,
nobody dares follow their parental instincts any more (or plain
commonsense) about deciding which languages actually matter to
the family. We’re urged to follow the crowd, whether at home,
in school
or in clinic.
Maybe this is why I feel strangely refreshed when I read about what
matters to organisations like OLCA
(Office pour la Langue et la Culture d’Alsace) or to people like
Aaron Carapella.

Worrying about our children’s future
is of course part and parcel of being a parent. But I find it
exceedingly difficult to plan that future, not least linguistically
and not least because the children will also have their say about
what matters to them, often much earlier than we suspect. In my
family, for example, we parents started off communicating with one
another in English, then learned one another’s languages because
English didn’t feel to us like a family language at all,
to later have our children make English not only a family language
but the one which they use among themselves, still today. Which made
me realise that I should stick to worrying about investing in
parenting instead, in whatever language.

The belief that some languages are more entitled to life
than others is particularly insidious where sign languages, as
opposed to spoken ones, enter the fray. The next post offers a few
thoughts on this.

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About Me

I’m a freelance
linguist with a keen interest in multilingualism. I was born in
Portugal, acquired French in Africa at age 3, married a Swede a
little later, raised three trilingual children (mostly) in Singapore,
and I work (mostly) in English. Homepage: Being Multilingual

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